About PIX

PIX is about investigating and engaging with broad and expansive fields of contemporary photographic practice in India, ranging from the application, conceptual standing and adaptability of photography to its subjects: its movement, transmission, appropriation and distinct relation to the allied arts.

PIX, the title and thematic for a photography quarterly, is a premise for how photography, as an evolving medium, has revealed the world in tangible as well as incongruous terms, allowing viewers and practitioners to question the photographer’s subjectivity together with the camera’s ‘framing’ of time and space (its ability to reveal, censor, alter and re-orient). The quarterly will seek not only to present photography in temporal, spatial or historical terms, but also in personal, self-conscious and aesthetic ways.

The structure for PIX will be consciously based on practices, technologies, curating and circulations of photography in India today. It seeks to contemplate photography in the present and the predicament of a generation influenced by the digital medium.Photography has come to be viewed as a means of the everyday, in possessing the power to influence us and even lead us astray. Images are now animated beings, with desires of their own and have started being cast into contemporary notions of picture theory associated with the visual arts, literature and mass media. This quarterly therefore is about opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture. For example, the ‘city’ as geographic and abstract space plays an important role by being the subject of reportage or the motivation behind commissioned work. The city is itself a living being, and a gallery space. How do photographers use it?

Alternately, how/why do photographers seek their subjects? What are their inclinations and is it dependent on a vast consumption of images form as media? The use of various format cameras such as the mobile phone camera are also being utilised for alternative reasons, personal and political. How does this alter the realness of representation?How have exhibitions in the last 10 years altered ways of viewing the domain of photography? Do young photographers provide an alternative to the mainstream? Who are these photographers?

By often seeking non-professional, amateur but legible photographers one would question the mainstream, and also the role of photography today: art-media, documentary, digital, virtual,etc. The writers for this may be scholars, theorists,researchers and practitioners working in the areas of art history, visual anthropology, philosophy, culture and technology studies as well as artists, curators,media practitioners, critics and students to provide material that is original, on the varied practices of young, emerging photographers in India.

Primary sponsors of issues 1-14 of PIX

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